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I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

Ian Bogost

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Ian Bogost
Age: 47
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Thinking
Useful
Definitely
Serious
Dichotomy
Stuff
Insights
Play
Provides
Work
Leisure
Way
Opposition
Think
Insight

More quotes by Ian Bogost

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It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.
Ian Bogost
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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
Ian Bogost
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Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.
Ian Bogost
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Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.
Ian Bogost
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There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.
Ian Bogost
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
Ian Bogost
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We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.
Ian Bogost
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We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?
Ian Bogost
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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
Ian Bogost
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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
Ian Bogost
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Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that's the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time.
Ian Bogost
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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
Ian Bogost
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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
Ian Bogost
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If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.
Ian Bogost
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To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.
Ian Bogost
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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
Ian Bogost
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If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.
Ian Bogost
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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
Ian Bogost
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Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.
Ian Bogost
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I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.
Ian Bogost